Sunday, April 1, 2012

Select... no longer worth it

I just put two books into the Select program-- The Shadows of Night, and an erotic short story that's been selling fairly well. I gave away 2100 copies of Shadows, and about 1700 copies of the other story. At its best, Shadows was ranked at #133 in the free store, and the other was around #206. A day after The Shadows of Night came off Select, I've sold two copies (plus three in the UK). I've sold seven copies (about normal) of the erotic short, plus two borrows. So I didn't get any sort of significant bump in sales on either book.

Back in January I had a book in Select go to around the same level in the free store, but after it came off Select I sold around 700 copies over the course of a couple of weeks. So (unless my sales suddenly take off, which seems unlikely) things have changed, in a really big way, presumably due to a shift in algorithms. The thread about Select on Kindleboards echoes this. There are still some people getting something out of Select-- if you're lucky and get your book featured on ENT or PoI, and the book gets up into the top fifty or so free books, you may sell lots of books afterwards. But it's no longer a reliable and consistent way to sell a lot of books by any means.

I'm sorry I put Shadows into Select, because now it's exclusive to Amazon for the next three months, and it would likely do better on three platforms rather than one. But I wanted it to get a good launch, and thought it was worth the experiment. I won't be putting anything else into Select, however, unless the algorithms change again.